Tag: Personas

I was out on a customer visit a few weeks ago, observing different developers at their workplace as they used Visual Studio to write code and build applications. One of the developers I observed behaved in ways that were common to both our opportunistic developer persona and the pragmatic developer persona (http://p.einarsen.no/programmer-personality-types-and-why-it-matters-at-all/). For example, he wanted…

…for understanding who you are designing for. I’ve been involved in too many discussions about a design (either after a usability study or a review or during the design process) when we are discussing something that doesn’t work or doesn’t feel right. Maybe we ran a usability study and observed that nobody could complete a…

There’s a great essay at http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748703989304575503730101860838.html describing how great ideas often don’t come from “momentous ideas transcending their surroundings, a gifted mind somehow seeing over the detritus of old ideas and ossified tradition”. Instead, many great ideas come from a process of tinkering with the materials or ideas at hand and combining them in interesting and novel…

I’ve created and worked with a number of different personas during my time in the Visual Studio User Experience team at Microsoft. I’ve learned a lot about how to use them effectively, and, contrary to what others have recently written about the use of personas, I believe they are still indispensable in product design, when…